Vice President Kamala Harris has it both ways on the campaign trail — simultaneously taking credit for some of the Biden-Harris administration’s record while casting former President Donald Trump as the incumbent.
The contradiction wrongly frames Trump as the candidate responsible for soaring migrant crime, spiking inflation, and the deadly Afghan withdrawal — three situations that arose under the Biden-Harris administration.
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Chris LaCivita
The contradiction stems from the media’s failure to widely ignore a “catch-22″ rooted within Harris’s candidacy: Harris cannot campaign on policies to fix crime, inflation, and border security without undermining the Biden-Harris administration’s claim of solving those key issues. However, Harris must tout the administration’s policy successes to validate her record and candidacy.
Harris’s media allies appear happy to let Harris speak out of both sides of her mouth. They failed to interview Harris about her policies for 36 days since she joined the race, a shocking amount of time for a new candidate who received an impromptu coronation.
In a Monday article titled “She’s the sitting vice president. She’s the candidate of change. How Harris is having it both ways,” Associated Press’s Zeke Miller and Chris Megerian appeared to praise the contradiction as “successfully harmonizing two seemingly competing messages”:
Kamala Harris is having it both ways as she hits the campaign trail after the Democratic National Convention, taking credit for parts of President Joe Biden’s record in rallies staged in front of Air Force Two while casting herself as a new leader who rails against “the politics of the past.”
In every presidential cycle candidates run on experience or freshness, but Harris so far appears to be successfully harmonizing two seemingly competing messages, much to the frustration of former President Donald Trump and his allies.
Harris’s aides appear to be enjoying the double-dipping contradiction.
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“She is her own leader,” senior campaign policy adviser Brian Nelson told reporters at a Bloomberg event at the DNC. “But she’s a leader who has been a partner to President Biden for these last three and a half years … [with] shared values and principles.”
It is unclear if Harris’s strategy will work long term.
“We’ve certainly had a front row seat to the ‘honeymoon,’” Trump pollsters Tony Fabrizio and Travis Tunis wrote Saturday. “In fact, the Media decided to extend the honeymoon for over 4 weeks now.”
Polling shows inflation, border security, and crime are key issues plaguing the nation under the Biden-Harris administration. Under its watch, inflation soared about 20 percent across the board, and millions of people invaded the southern border while illegal migrants were accused of committing heinous crimes.
Sixty-three percent of voters said crime is a major factor in who they will vote for in the presidential election, a recent CBS News poll found. Nearly two-thirds of Americans said soaring costs and migration are the most important issues they face, a YouGov poll found in August.
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.
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